What is the role of GIS in urban land-use planning?

• A. It determines political boundaries and election districts.
• B. It provides weather data to inform city services.
• C. GIS maps and analyzes land use, zoning, infrastructure, and environmental features; supports scenario analysis, spatial planning, and monitoring of change over time.
• D. It designs building facades for new developments.

Answer: (C)

GIS in urban land-use planning is about using a spatial toolkit to map and analyze how land is used and how different physical and social factors fit together. It combines layers such as current land use, zoning boundaries, roads and utilities, property parcels, and environmental features, then lets planners visualize patterns and relationships. This enables scenario analysis—testing how changes like a rezoning, new transit lines, or infrastructure investments would affect where people live and work, traffic, and environmental impact. It also supports spatial planning decisions by identifying suitable sites, aligning public services with growth, and ensuring compatibility with environmental constraints. Importantly, GIS allows monitoring changes over time, so planners can track redevelopment, densification, or green-space preservation and measure progress toward goals.

Other options miss the core function: political boundaries focus on governance, weather data serves service operations rather than land-use decisions, and designing building facades is a design task rather than data-driven planning and analysis.